Liam Maxwell

I attended a meeting of the Conservative Technology Forum on Monday night at Westminster and thought that Government 2010 readers may be interested in reading a little bit more about current Conservative thinking in terms of personal data and IT procurement.  The meeting was addressed by Councillor Liam Maxwell from the Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.  Liam is Lead Member for Policy and Performance at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, where his brief includes Information Technology.

Liam’s background is as an IT Director in Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 business service companies. He is the author of How the Internet took Obama back to the 1950s (Centre for Policy Studies, 2008) and co-author, with Mark Thompson, of OpenSource, Open Standards: Reforming IT procurement in Government, a report for the Conservative Party, 2008. 

At the meeting on Monday Liam talked at length about the need for ‘intelligent procurement’ of government IT in order to support the manner in which citizens will want to interact with government in future. 

He expressed dismay at the fact that some 80% of IT spend on behalf of government is spent through large, incumbent, IT vendors – most of which have an excessive focus on proprietary software platforms and operating systems.  Indeed, Liam made reference to the fact that Becta – the body responsible for technology in learning – had just one listed open source vendor. 

The problem, he suggested, was that risk – in terms of IT procurement – always lay with the government.  Therefore, systems have become stale, are often unfit for purpose, and are rarely focused on the needs of the citizen.    There is an overriding perception that government designs services – rather than the citizens that services are meant to serve. 

What is needed, in his view, is that we create a culture of “government relationship management”.  He also warned that the age of big system procurement was over.  What is needed are solutions at the margin – increasingly focused on open data and built on open source software that can be iterated and refined at much lower cost than currently.  He warned that budgets for IT spend would decline massively in all levels of government. 

You may be interested in reading this report report by Liam, on personal data, published by the Centre for Policy Studies earlier this year.

Hollywood LA

Los Angeles City Council voted on Tuesday to replace its open source Novell communication system with cloud-based Google Apps. 

The authority expects to save $5.5 million over five years by repurposing computer servers and reassigning IT staff.  Read more…

The vote is a significant milestone in the world of computing. Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest metropolis in the United States, will be the first major U.S. city to fully entrust its e-mail system to the cloud. Files will be stored at Google’s data centers rather than on L.A.’s own servers.

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This video was filmed at the G2010 conference on Thursday Oct 22nd 2009 and features:

• Jan Gower, Vice President, IBM;
• Tony Collins, Executive Editor, Computer Weekly;
• Stephen Hilton, Bristol City Council;
• John Shewell, Brighton & Hove City Council;
• Anthony Zacharzewski, Democratic Society

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This video was filmed at the G2010 conference on Thursday Oct 22nd 2009 and features:

• Ewan McIntosh, Digital Commissioner for Scotland and Northern Ireland, Channel 4/4ip
• Chris Taggart, Founder / Developer of OpenlyLocal;
• Stuart McRae, Executive Collaboration Evangelist with IBM’s Lotus Software;
• Paul Canning, Public Sector Web Professionals;
• Colm Hayden, Technical Director of Anaeko

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This video was filmed at the G2010 conference on Thursday Oct 22nd 2009 and features:

• Dominique Lazanski, Digital Strategist & President Last Press Label
• Jim Killock, Executive Director, Open Rights Group;
• Philip Virgo, Secretary General, EURIM;
• Phil Kingsland from Nominet;
• Hamish Nicklin Head of Google’s UK Public Sector and Government team

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Peter is President of YouGov a research and consulting organisation, pioneering the use of the Internet to collect high quality in-depth data for market research, organisational research and stakeholder consultation. Peter has been a journalist and political commentator for more than 30 years, working for the Sunday Times, Independent, New Statesman, and Evening Standard as well as broadcast news productions like BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News.

This video was filmed at the G2010 conference on Thursday Oct 22nd 2009.

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This Government Services panel discussion was filmed at the G2010 Conference on Oct 22nd 2009 and featured:

• Gordon McKenzie, Microsoft;
• Tanya Oliver, Kent County Council;
• Michael Juer, Northamptonshire County Council

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This video was filmed at the G2010 conference on Thursday Oct 22nd 2009 with William Heath, founder of CTRL SHIFT

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This video was filmed at the G2010 conference on Thursday Oct 22nd 2009 with Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety.org

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